Li-Ning’s outdoor bet exposes limits of a single-brand strategy

In late November 2025, Li-Ning opened a store unlike any it had built before. Tucked inside Beijing’s Chaoyang Joy City mall, Counterflow — the brand’s first standalone outdoor retail concept — presented technical jackets, all-terrain hiking shoes, and a dedicated community corner for urban outdoor enthusiasts. It was a statement of intent: Li-Ning, best known for running shoes and badminton rackets, was coming for the outdoor market. The timing was notable. The store launched in a market that China’s biggest sportswear conglomerate had already spent years partitioning. Through Amer Sports — in which it holds a majority stake — Anta Group controls Arc’teryx at the premium end and Salomon in professional outdoor. Its directly operated brands cover the remaining terrain: Descente for high-end ski and performance wear, Kolon Sport for outdoor lifestyle. By the time Li-Ning’s first outdoor store cut its ribbon, there was little uncontested ground left. That context matters because Li-Ning’s 2025 annual results, released March 19, offer only partial comfort. Revenue rose 3.2% year-over-year to 29.6 billion RMB ($4.3 billion), and net operating cash inflow held firm at 4.9 billion RMB ($708.9 million). But gross margin slipped 0.4 percentage points to 49%, and net profit attributable to equity holders fell 2.6% to 2.9 billion RMB. For a brand plotting an expensive expansion into a crowded new category, the numbers describe a company that is stable — not one with the headroom to sustain a prolonged battle. Brand stretch The challenge is not simply one of timing or competition. It runs deeper, into the architecture of Li-Ning’s brand strategy itself. Since the mid-2010s, the company has anchored its business around what it calls a “single brand, multi-category, diversified channels” approach, using the Li-Ning name alone to cover as many sport scenarios as possible. The outdoor push is that strategy’s most ambitious test yet. At the March earnings briefing, co-CEO Takeshi Kosaka (formerly known by his Chinese name Qian Wei) was careful to frame the company’s stated conservatism as something more active. Steady operations, he said, did not mean standing still: the company would attack and defend where it should. It was a characteristically measured formulation. However, it also raised a question the strategy document cannot answer: when one brand attempts to mean everything to every athlete, it risks meaning nothing in particular to any of them. The evidence for that risk is visible in Li-Ning’s own category breakdown. Running, basketball, training, badminton, table tennis, sports casual — six core categories, with outdoor, tennis, and pickleball now being actively developed alongside them. In the minds of consumers, Li-Ning can be a running shoe, a basketball shoe, or a badminton racket. What it is best known for is harder to pin down — unless you look at the data. Running leads That data points firmly in one direction. Running is now Li-Ning’s largest single category, accounting for 31% of omnichannel retail sell-through in 2025, its highest recorded share. Annual sales of professional running shoes exceeded 26 million pairs. The category didn’t arrive overnight: Li-Ning has been building its running franchise for the better part of a decade, investing in technology platforms, signing elite athletes, and cultivating a presence at major domestic race events. The result is a business with genuine depth, not just breadth. Badminton tells a similar story. Li-Ning entered the category in 2009 and spent years building credibility from the ground up. In 2025, that investment paid off visibly: badminton revenue rose 30% YoY, racket sales hit 5.5 million units, and the category reached a record share of total revenue at around 7%. Crucially, the product mix had shifted — where apparel once accounted for the majority of badminton revenue, rackets, strings, and shoes now make up roughly 85%. That’s the signature of a brand that has earned specialist status, not merely borrowed it. Crowded terrain The outdoor category offers no such established foundation. Li-Ning formally entered the segment in 2024, launching a product line led by the Wanlongjia technical jacket series. Counterflow followed in November 2025 with a single store in its trial phase, with Kosaka acknowledging at the earnings briefing that the product mix was not yet broad enough to stand alone as a category. The company is still searching for a replicable model. Running took a decade to reach 31% of retail sales. Outdoor is starting from zero in a market that stopped being open territory years ago. The brands Li-Ning is now competing against did not arrive recently. The North Face, Columbia, and Mammut have long-established positions in the China outdoor market. Arc’teryx and Salomon, operating under Amer Sports with Anta’s backing, have spent years building premium credibility with Chinese consumers. Descente has staked out the high-end ski and performance segment, while Kolon Sport occupies the outdoor lifestyle space. Each has a defined position. Li-Ning, entering late under a brand that consumers associate primarily with running shoes, has yet to establish one. That is the core problem a single-brand strategy cannot easily solve. Anta has the luxury of letting Arc’teryx be Arc’teryx — a distinct identity, a distinct consumer, a distinct price point. Li-Ning must ask its one brand to carry all of that weight simultaneously: running, basketball, badminton, outdoor, and beyond. The risk is not that any individual category fails. It’s that the cumulative stretch leaves consumers unable to say, with any conviction, what Li-Ning is fundamentally for. The long game Li-Ning has earned the right to be taken seriously as a long-term builder. Running and badminton are proof of that. But both of those categories succeeded because the brand committed to them early, deeply, and patiently, before the market became congested. The outdoor segment offers none of those conditions. The question investors and brand watchers should be asking is not whether Counterflow will eventually turn a profit. It is whether Li-Ning can develop a coherent outdoor identity under a brand already stretched across six core categories — and whether it can do so before the window, already narrow, closes entirely.

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Li-Ning’s outdoor bet exposes limits of a single-brand strategy